One of the things I don’t think people realize about Daniel is that he’s a hell of an organizer, but if the internet stories let people dismiss him and not take him as seriously, that’s not a bad thing at all.
So far, Mr. Biss has raised $37,148 online for his bid to win a Republican-held seat representing the north Chicago suburbs — a figure pumped up in part by an appeal from one of Mr. Biss’s friends, who vowed to subject himself to various cyberspace humiliations if viewers met certain donating targets. The resulting video has been watched more than 16,000 times on YouTube.
ActBlue was created as a political action committee in June 2004 by two Democratic activists from Cambridge, Mass., shortly after the presidential campaign of Howard Dean showed the power of online fund raising. The idea was to transfer that force to Democrats more broadly. Since its inception, ActBlue has raised more than $28 million for Democratic candidates, mostly by making it easy for supporters to bundle together small-dollar donations made via credit card. Mr. Edwards, for example, has raised more than $4 million online via ActBlue.
ActBlue started by focusing on presidential and congressional races. Last year, the site began making its services available for local races in some states. Local candidates have collected more than $750,000 so far this year, up 20% from the total local candidates raised through ActBlue last year, according to ActBlue. Much of the money in the 2006 campaign, about $500,000, was raised by liberal bloggers and their readers on behalf of Democratic secretary of state candidates in seven states. Five of them won.
ActBlue runs on donations from users and provides its services free to candidates. Republicans have tried setting up similar sites but none have taken off so far. Some campaigns, like Mr. Biss’s, also use ActBlue as a low-cost way of processing donations from local fund-raisers.
One thing I’ve been wondering about ActBlue — would it be legal for them to pay the processing fees out of PAC funds (if they had them) and pass on the full donation to the campaign?
This will tell you everything you need to know about Daniel’s integrity (or lack thereof)
http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/0709.1291
That is a ridiculous comment by John Doe. The fact that a paper (or multiple papers) were written about Daniel’s work
on the tangent bundle of a smooth manifold is a **credit** to
the importance of Biss’s mathematical work.